phpStageManager VS hiccup

"Nobody ever generates JSON using string interpolation." Oh boy, you just took me back to my first ever PHP project. Feast your eyes: https://github.com/oxguy3/phpStageManager/blob/master/events...

This file generates a feed of events (rehearsals for my high school play) to be rendered by the FullCalendar JS plugin. FullCalendar required a particular data schema that didn't match the format of my MySQL table, which meant I couldn't just json_encode() the MySQL results. I guess I just didn't conceptualize that I could create a new object that matched the FullCalendar format, and then call json_encode(). So, I generated JSON with strings.

Honestly it's a toss-up whether the JSON generation is the worst thing about this file. It looks like I also made a separate database query for every single row to get the username, because I apparently didn't know how to do joins. Could probably spend an hour listing some of the other little nuggets of awful in there. But hey, it got the job done! :)

Not equivalent, but arguably more useful for manual authoring: Emmet [0] was all the range a while back, and I still use it to write HTML. It comes naturally if you're used to writing CSS-like selectors, and mostly gets out of the way.

DSL-wise, I've rather enjoyed Clojure's Hiccup [1].

[0] https://emmet.io/

[1] https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup

* Single-Page App: shadow-cljs for the build concerns (https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs), Reagent with Re-frame for complex/large app (https://reagent-project.github.io and https://github.com/day8/re-frame). Even if we now prefer using HTMX (https://htmx.org) and server-side rendering (Hiccup way of manipulating HTML is just amazing, https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup).

I'd prefer hiccup.

That is why I like Hiccup/ Clojure so much: https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup It is very natural to produce something resembling a document in pure Clojure data structures and then just convert it to valid HTML. I think, Reagent has some hiccup extensions that are nice like writing the class or id with a . or # notation right in the keyword describing the tag. So there probably still is some space to improve the ergonomics and probably performance. Concatenating strings still wins performance wise by a lot.

Clojure people have been doing this for a decade or so. It’s really so much better to work with. All started with Hiccup and when React came along you got Reagent and many more developments building on the idea.

You’re halfway to Clojure’s hiccup syntax[1] there.

[1]: https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup/blob/master/doc/syntax...

That, or Hiccup.

I'm about to learn PureScript, coming from a functional TypeScript, Clojure and Elm background. To get a first taste for the language I thought I'd rewrite my Clojure test-app which generates static HTML files from JSON input using the (hiccup templating library)[https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup]. Is there some similar library in PureScript which would provide functions to create an HTML document and its content? I could not find anything when searching pursuit, but I might be just be using the correct search terms.

In Clojure thing are much more decentralised. We tend to use basic data structures along with data DSLs like Hiccup to build our software since this is the simplest way to convey meaning while retaining structure to perform additional data transformations.